Post by michaelivan on Jun 21, 2014 0:05:47 GMT -5

This is "old" news by now, but I've seen no discussion of it here. As a fan of simulation games, Chris Sawyer's Roller Coaster Tycoon series is one of my favorite series to play on PC. So the tranwreck that Atari calls "Roller Coaster Tycoon 4 Mobile" is baffling.

I'm going to go on to explain the issues with the gameplay. Separating it from everything else so that you can skip the entire thing just to get to the point, if you'd like.

The guests don't follow paths. They don't use entrances, either, and just enter from any edge of the park, making any transport infrastructure a decorative formality. As if that didn't already make as little sense as possible, the ride construction gameplay is ABSURD. Instead of building the park of your dreams at your own pace, you have to wait for a ride to be built - a single ride - and if you don't wanna wait, you can pay to speed things up.

This is the laziest and least intuitive "simulation" game I might have ever seen. It's garbage.

Atari claimed that the game was made with involvement and oversight from Chris Sawyer himself. Does that sound ridiculously hard to believe? Well, it is. Because Atari lied about that, as you can see from the link provided below. He was actually not involved in the development of the mobile game, and seeing as RCT4M looks nothing like something he would make, who would be surprised? (He's been busy making an iOS port of his original game, Transport Tycoon, with his new dev studio. I'd imagine he wouldn't even have the time.)

In response to the overwhelmingly negative reaction, Atari announced that the PC version of RCT4 will be an online multiplayer experience, completely different from RCT4M and being handled by a different (unnamed) studio of developers. Even less convincing is the supposed Fall 2014 release date, although it was mentioned that the developers plan to release the game through Steam Early Access to refine the game experience through gamer response, so there's a refreshing glimmer of hope... right?

I'm having a hard time making sense of what's going on here. How could Atari have made such a huge mistake?